This is the showreel we had to submit for our group project. Not happy with it at all, but it was the last thing I had to deliver this year. For this reason, I was more than happy to finally finish uni. In case you are wondering, the music is Dave Matthews. Also, see the “character sheet” below.

These are the very last life drawings at Teesside, sessions are up!

Studio Practice and Business module’s design document. This was a supporting material for our business plan and presentation we had to give.

Probably this is the last update, as it is time to hand my final year project in. The next two or three weeks will be another though run to finish Creative Animation, Studio Practice and Business and Drawing and Composition. At the moment I have no idea how I will do it, but hopefully I will manage (I was suggested to perhaps sleep more, so…)

The sound is of course is very much temporary, I will rework it once I get time after uni to work on the exciting things again.

It is somehow amazing how many mistakes you can make. It feels very much like if I was working to create problems that I can solve later on. There is a huge number of render and lighting inconsistency even I only have 15 scenes rendered so far, not even mentioning animation issues, etc.

I am totally running out of time, yet there are so many details and major consideratioins that I should be chaning or reviewing. I will devote the next week to do the post-production and add audio finally.

Note: it is intentionally low-key but it should not be this dark. I loose brighness somewhere between Premiere and Vimeo.

This is only ruff cut, ruff timing, ruff animation blocking. Probably only the cut of the guy standing up is final animation. I have more scenes blocked out however, those are not connected to this sequence. Will upload them later.

Pseudo-final render-still / semi-finished lighting

This is a character turnaround anf an early sketch.

I went to London this weekend to have an interview for the Royal College of Art’s animation course. I did not have time for sightseeing unfortunately, but the Rodchenko & Popova exhibition was an unmissable one. I am supposed to run on low-budget nowadays, but I had to buy a copy of Hogarth’s revised and updated Dynamic Anatomy. Damn you Tate Modern bookshop.

Here is a sketch I made and a couple of photos:

Rigging. I’m pretty happy with my rig, it can do all I need, it only misses the auto-animate button. I have come up with a way to properly rig the eyes, including the surrounding skin (that moves with the eye naturally). I was struggling with it a lot, as the whole system kept conflicting with the direction constraint (the eyeballs are direction constrained to their control object) as it was not really compatible with the local rotations of the rig. If the local rotation space of the head changed (eg I tilted it) the rotations axis have been offseted. And thehidious snapping, the eyejoints on extreme rotations kept on snaping (turning 180 degrees). And why the hell could I not find a way to disable the constraint on z axis?!

Luckily all fixed, hopefully might be beneficial to some of the fellow students. Here is the friendly schematic for the system – it has all one need, bone driven lid rotations, flesh movement surrounding the eyes and… well that is all…:-) :

Have you ever had the Life Drawing Rage? Apparently it is a symptom of the 3rd Year Syndrome.

Friday’s life drawing session was a special one. I was the only one to turn up so I had a private model. How cool is that? Not even mentioning the last.fm jazz shuffle I put on in the background. Reward of the last man standing.

Life drawing used to mean a single pose for 3-4 hours for me, taking a break every hour. Those were back in the Corvin Drawing School times, in 2006. We made pose sketches called “kroki”-s (croquis, french, simply means sketch) but no one cared about them really. I remember struggling a lot with finishing the drawings in time, heh. Eversince starting animation the figure drawing approach has changed, and no pose is ever longer than 30 minutes really. So this friday, as I was in nostalgic mood, I asked for a “special extra long” 90 minutes long pose. It was agonising but refreshing in the same time, I go so out of practice doing proper life drawings. I wonder how would I cope with a 4hour long pose? Any fanatics interested hiring a model for 4 hours?

I started systematically draining the university’s resources, starting with the whiteboard pens. Herb must be glad about it.

Concert in Stockton, ARC.

This is the flyer I designed for the upcoming social event we organise:

NOTE: THIS PORTFOLIO IS OUTDATED. MASSIVELY.

The portfolio I kindly submitted to the Royal College of Art’s animation department for my masters.

From here…

I go here…

…every day

African God Illustrations for Drawing and Composition 3

UNKULUNKULU (Zulu)

“Old, Old One.” Unkulunkulu was both the first man and the creator, a god of the earth who had no traffic with the heavens. Unkulunkulu showed men how to live together and gave them knowledge of the world in which they lived.

YO (Dahomey)

A trickster, neither god nor human. Yo’s greed constantly gets him in trouble. Mawu created him for no good reason. Yo is everywhere. You can’t kill him, you can’t eat him, you can’t get rid of him at all. Yo is the only one of his kind. One is enough.

A charcoal drawing of a paper-torso in the drawing lab

Two 10 mins sketches.
Charcoal background, pencil, ereaser for the highlights

Coloured pencil

This is what happens when you stay up late, don’t want to work on the stuffs you should be working on and it is too cold to go outside. Of course, you make nonsense photos!

Concept Development Animatic from Gergely Wootsch on Vimeo.

2D Character Animation ICA from Gergely Wootsch on Vimeo.

2D Computer Animation ICA – Rooftop Chase from Gergely Wootsch on Vimeo.

Character Animation ICA – Alien from Gergely Wootsch on Vimeo.

Character Aanimation ICA – The Fred Astaire Dance – UNFINISHED from Gergely Wootsch on Vimeo.

Computer Animation ICA – The Useless Machine from Gergely Wootsch on Vimeo.

It was raining the other day.

It was raining the other day

I’ve been practicing character rigging to be able to create a good rig later on for my practical project. Here it is, Edmond, my updated 2nd year character. Currently he has a sretchy fk/ik arm with switch and soft IK; complete facial rig; non twisting, snapping shoulders; stretchy IK legs with footroll and multiple rotation pivots (one for the toes, one for the heel). There is no point working on him anymore – I think this is as good as it will get – for a first rig I think I should be satisfied Now time for finish my character animation blocking!

FACIAL RIG SETUP in XSI

I’ve been getting questions about the facial setup: I am using a joystick controls to modulate the facial shape keys. I used Jason Osipa’s Stop Staring for reference.

For the controls’ setup you might want to take a look for the tutorial on Mattmos.com (Creating blend shapes and controllers in XSI).

Bear in mind that some of the functions changed in XSI since the tutorial was written. I could not get the image to weightmap script working so I had to hand paint the weight maps. Also, the function you will use instead of Deform\Shape\Connect with weightmap is Deform\Shape\Modulate Shape Key with Weight Map.

1, 2, 10, 15min poses: